1
Taylor’s Chapter 10
Taylor opens this chapter with claims reminiscent of those he developed in Chapter 9.
The phenomenon of language: “that people say things and others understand them”.
That words and other signs have meaning is deep, enigmatic, and difficult to understand.
The sense of depth comes from the realization that language has to do with what is
essential to human life, and from the pervasiveness of meaning in our lives, and the
difficulty of getting the phenomenon of meaning into some focus. Meaning is everywhere
in the human-made world, even within ourselves as when we speak silently to ourselves.
However, there is something in our modern culture that resists this mysterious view of
meaning. This resistance comes from our commitment to reason/scientific thought. On
this account, language is like other natural phenomena and all we need do is to study it
and formulate a theory to explain it (presumably this is what linguistic is all about). As
Taylor points out, this was a small part of the agenda of 17th c nominalism; the major part
being to find a language appropriate to scientific inquiry. Why should scientific inquiry
not find ordinary/vernacular language appropriate to science? The answer is the same we
give today, namely it is insufficiently “accurate”; ordinary language misleads (Hobbes’
quote that “words can also be the money of fools”), what we need is a language that
directly reflect the empirical world. Language is an instrument (organon) and as an
instrument is should be useful and to be useful for scientific inquiry it must reflect
(designate) Nature accurately.
Now it is Taylor claim that this 17th c nominalism is not merely a view on language it has
everything to do with the demise of the universe as a meaningful order (that is an order of
“being” which could be explained in terms of the ideas it embodies – in ultimate
semiological categories (see Ch. 9). Seventeenth century nominalism went along with the
bifurcation of Nature as wholly “disenchanted” and therefore “objective and the selfdefining Self (subject). Our very conception of what language is depends then on our
conception of the relation between human nature and nature. On the 17th c view of
scientific inquiry, the task is not to identify the “meaning of being” (being has no
meaning) but to represent things as they are (as a reality independent of meaning, where
meaning belongs to the subject and is therefore “subjective”). Thus, Taylor concludes
that the reason we have this nominalist view of language as “representation” is that we
are so eager to overcome “projection”/”anthropomorphism”, we are so eager to separate
meaning from being in what became the separation of subject and object. The instrument
of language is useful because instead of having to deal with the universe as endless
particulars, we can in language group/order these particulars into classes assuming of
course that classes (words) are clear and distinct (first as “ideas” and later, operationally,
as designating particulars). Words signify or designate!
Now if we extend this nominalism to include human nature (wherein human beings
become the object of scientific inquiry), then speech as a human phenomenon becomes
mere sound (to attribute anything else to speech is “projection”). This is then extreme
2
naturalism to understand speech as “sound” as physical in a larger in physical context. Of
course, this view of language as “natural” abstracts from anything “inner” whether
thought, ideas, feeling, interests, aspiration, etc. and ) hence nominalism leads to
naturalism and designativism, and eventually, the elimination of mind altogether. (See
Bloomfield or more recently a similar version in Pinker for this entirely modern view).
Of course, one can argue that, for example, Chomsky has destroyed this naturalism in
linguistics and indeed designativism itself has been radically altered in our century by for
example Gottlob Frege’s distinction between meaning and reference (or saying and
referring). Frege forced the designativist to recognize that meaning cannot be subsumed
under reference alone and in doing so Frege brought the “meaning activity” of the subject
back into consideration of the meaning of language. Moreover, once we bring the subject
back into meaning we also give up extreme naturalism as a view of reality.
What emerges from Frege’s distinction between meaning and reference (the idea that
meaning determines reference) is a whole new range of theories of language that would
seem to put into question the whole worldview of designativism/nominalism/naturalism.
Yet, we must be careful here. For Fregean derived theories of linguistic meaning remain
entirely dependent on the notion of representation; that is the function of language
remains to frame/encode “information” of (about) a potential or actual independent
reality. Thus, the meaning of sentences in “truth conditional semantics” is that meaning
can be captured in the concept of “truth” and that truth is a matter of “information” and
“information” is only information if it accurately designates the real. Now of course it is
well recognized that meaning is more than “information” in the narrow senses, after all
we all produce utterances that strictly speaking carry no information but rather give
direction, etc. But note that we evaluate the “information content” of all utterances
relative to the “informational content” of utterances whose information, or propositional,
content is to represent (what is potentially or actually real). On this view the function of
language, specifically of words, is to frame representations (informational content) which
can then be uttered in numerous ways (using propositional “attitudes” e.g., “think”,
“hope”, “believe”, “feel” etc. to “moderate” the informational content). Taylor notes that
this instrumental (combinatorial - syntactic) view of language was recognized by von
Humboldt early in the 19th c and Chomsky in the middle of the 20th c. and hence the
central focus on syntax, as the means whereby we can produce (frame) representation, in
a theory of meaning. [Note here that syntax is central because of the instrumental view of
language as “framing” representations is simply presupposed in any theory of meaning.
But it treats syntax as a formal, mathematical “object” evident to an inquirer quite
independently of the language s/he speaks.]
Hence, “understanding” language (understanding implies “meaning”) is the
understanding of how we represent things in language – and this is faithful to both the
17th c bifurcation of subject-object (Naturalism) and its 20th c epistemologies of science.
Thus, there are two features of contemporary theories of meaning, in the Enlightenment
tradition: (1) focus on representations (framed in language), and (2) the objectivist
(observer stance). These two features are inwardly connected, the objectivist stance
allows for the centrality of representation. Meaning is the generation of representations;
3
hence meaning has also been replaced by the notion of “information” (the content of
which are representations).
Taylor next turns to expressivist theories of meaning: one he traces from Herder and von
Humboldt, and also through Hamann, to in our age Heidegger. [Note that designativist
theories belong to the Anglo-Saxon world (England and NA) whereas the expressivist
theories, roughly, align with continentalist traditions.] Von Humboldt, like Frege, gives
priority to speech over language. However, as we will see, the difference between them
concerns just what the activity of speech enables. In the remainder of the chapter, Taylor
attempts to explore this question of what speech enables, and claims that once we
understand better what speech enables (obviously not the framing of representations) we
will also see a very different theory of meaning emerge.
1. In speech we formulate things; we bring to explicit awareness what was, before
speech, only implicit (“lived”). This is Herder’s thesis. We come in speech to an
articulate view of things – someone who expresses is articulate and is able to get the
“shape” of things “right” (becomes explicitly conscious in what Taylor calls the
“formulation” of things in recognizing them).
What does “formulation” enable?
a. I can get an articulated view of the matter (focus)
b. Once I have this view I can draw its boundaries (contrastively)
c. With focus and boundaries, I have an explicit awareness of things
2. Formulation places some matter in the “open” between interlocutors; it puts things in
“public” space. This entails the following.
a. In speaking we found public spaces, or a common vantage point (not merely
communication)
b. Language then in founding public space also places what has been articulated in a
dialogical context of sociality
c. Public spaces make possible forms of institutions indispensable to human life
3. Formulation in addition to articulation and founding of public spaces also the medium
in which our most important concerns (truth, knowledge, beauty, faith, love, etc.) belong
to us all. This entails the following.
a. For example, in distinguishing between anger and indignation we presuppose
“standards” or norms (both moral and otherwise)
b. This notion of “standards” is closely aligned with then notion of “significance”
and this, in turn, reflects directly on significance for the subject/person who in
expressing also recognizes these standards
c. An expressive theory of language enables the articulation of standards in public
space
4
In summary, there are then three things language enables: (1) making articulate, and
hence bringing to explicit awareness, (2) putting things in public space, and (3) making
significant distinctions among characteristically human concerns. If we examine these
three enabling functions of language, Taylor maintains, there will emerge three relevant
dimensions of a theory of meaning. Let us examine these three dimensions.
1. The first dimension concerns the role of expression. Language not only
articulates but it also expresses. Expression is also pertinent to putting
things in public space and formulating significant human concerns. Thus,
the activity of speech is not first of all used in describing or representing;
rather it is to put something between (public space), to put something “up
front”, and “out there”. That is, speech makes manifest (to others and
myself – again “public” space). Here what I say, in creating public space,
also expresses (makes manifest, display) my “stance”/”attitude” in public
space. My speech (tone of voice, choice of words, etc.) is indicative of my
disinterest, passion, affection, seriousness, etc. I bear in public space.
Taylor is at pain to note that this view is very different if we take speech to
be the product of the monological subject whose consciousness of things
is then spoken. Such a view, is very different from the first person truthfunctional, designative theory of meaning who speech is intended to
convey information s/he has) to another. This is not so much
communication which presupposes a common public space as it is
information transmission from one to another (and presupposes a public
space). Taylor notes, for example, that our suspicion of rhetoric
(manifesting/displaying) is a “cardinal sin” in contemporary philosophy,
and science, for it seems wholly at odds with our modern aspiration that
our language (our speech) accurately depicts or designates beyond time
and place. But as Taylor remarks no normal human prose ever approaches
this ideal. Of course, science does abstract with austerity from
conversational context in which we are concerned with
manifesting/displaying, but science can only do so by creating of
specialists using a particular technical language dedicated to depiction.
Taylor is not one to sidestep this achievement and he readily
acknowledges the rationality of designation, of science, and its
“languages”, but he also argues that the expressive dimension of language
returns again and again even in our most rigorous designation. If we want
to eliminate all traces of expression, he notes, we will have to turn to
artificial languages.
The expressive function of language is also central to the formulation of
our most significant concerns because to be sensitive to these concerns is
to have articulated the standards that those concerns rely on. Not in the
sense that we can describe those standards, rather that we give expression
to a sensitivity wherein we articulate those standards. Evidently, such
articulation is the expression of personal style of which we neither have
5
explicit awareness nor a vocabulary. If we then consider that such
expression opens up a public space our expression is one of our sensitivity
to standards that may then be articulated in description. Here, just as in the
role expression has in opening public space, expression of our most
significant concerns is more fundamental than description of those
concerns.
By taking proper account of the expressive dimension of meaning, and its
role in the function of articulating fundamental concerns and opening a
public space, we get a whole other view of language and its boundaries
than if we were to focus on the designative dimension alone or as primary.
For consider if accept the designative dimension of language as an
information-carrying instrument as primary, all other uses of language and
all other expressive activities become quite distinct from language in its
representational function. [Note only under this condition can linguistics
be considered an autonomous discipline and speech becomes unique as an
activity of designation.] But if place the expressive function of language as
primary then we get a much broader view of language, and on this much
broader view of language there may be some hope of understanding its
meaning (and the wider sense of meaning as expressive). Language is then
no longer seen as merely designative/referential/prose but it becomes part
of what Cassirer called “symbolic forms”.
2. The second dimension of meaning that emerges from three enabling
functions of language is that all three functions involve different ways of
disclosure, of making things plain. Articulating something makes it
evident precisely in making it an object of explicit awareness. Articulation
in conversation discloses in the sense of putting in it public space, and
articulating relevant to our foundational concerns disclose those concerns
in the sense that these can be our concerns at all. This disclosure is in a
sense to bring to light – or bringing into a clearing - following Heidegger.
3. The third dimension of meaning that emerges from the three enabling
functions of language is what Taylor calls the “constitutive” dimension of
language. Language does not only serve to describe or represent things,
rather there some phenomena central to human life that are partly
constituted by language. Consciousness or explicit awareness is
constituted in our articulation. The public space is founded and shaped by
language, and our typically human concerns exist only through articulation
and expression.
That means that articulations are crucial to the phenomena of human life.
For example, our feelings, those essential to our human concerns, are
partly shaped by the way we articulate them. When we offer descriptions
of how we feel, our feelings are not unaffected by our articulations, rather
our articulations are constitute of our feelings.
6
Of course the articulation of feeling also helps us to understand them and
self-understanding itself is constitutive of feeling. Even so feelings cannot
be changed at will by the descriptions we offer. Rather feelings are shaped
by the descriptions we offer but which seem to us adequate. Similarly, the
formulations we offer of our fundamental concerns are also an attempt to
get it right – and we realize these formulations may be deep or shallow,
deluded or insightful, more or less accurate, etc. Such self-descriptions are
constitutive of our feeling (our feelings can be deep or shallow etc.) and
concerns. As Taylor notes, it follows that people with very different
language skills have very different feelings, aspirations, interests,
sensibilities, etc.
What is true for feelings and concerns is also true for our relationships
with other people. Political and other institutional structures, friendships,
relationship of intimacy, etc. are constituted in language. Of these are also
relationships that can be analyzed in term of power, property, wealth,
ethnicity, subordination, equality, etc, but the point is that these would not
be realized without language. Language is essential because these different
relationships are in fact different shapes of public spaces established and
maintained in language. This is not to say that many relationships are
unspoken and part of implicit social practices, but these are necessarily
interstitial, always existing within a framework of what is expressed (in
many different modes). Without language there would be no implicit
common understanding.
The “constitutive” characteristic of language is that our language enters
into our inner life (of feelings, interests, attitudes, aspirations, etc.), our
relationship to others and institutions, and all our social-cultural practices,
doing, planning, and actions. Thus, the three enabling functions of
language show us that language is the locus of three different dimensions
of disclosure or meaning:
1. that language is expressive, and this links it with other modes of
expression,
2. that language in articulation makes explicit, and.
3. that language is constitutive, entering into the reality it is about.
Now evidently the expressive and constitutive dimensions of meaning, above, are clearly
at odds with the truth-functional theory of meaning. Yet Taylor warns us not to be too
quick in rejecting a truth-functional theory of meaning. Thus, for example, a truth
functional theory might simply claim that it deals with only one dimension of meaning,
namely how meaningful utterance are about the world and the situation of human speaker
(propositional attitudes such as hope, belief, see, etc.); it can then leave the other
dimensions of language to other theories of meaning. Thus, truth functional theorist
might simply claim to a division of labor among theories of meaning.
7
Of course, as Taylor notes this kind of division of labor will not work. [The argument
here gets complex (pp. 264ff.) but basically follows my lectures on intensionality and
how the criteria of extensionality fail (substitution of co-referential expression or
identicals and existential generalization) in the context (prefix) of propositional attitudes.]
Thus, one can try to apply a truth-functional analysis to sentences in intensional contexts
(prefixed by propositional attitudes) – and this might even work for “middle size dry
goods” – but truth-functional analysis will not work, that is we cannot set out truth
conditions, without some grasp of the “meaning” (expressing, disclosing, and constituting
dimensions of meaning) of the language. Or, in other words, the representational function
of language is dependent on the expressing, articulating, and constituting dimensions of
meaning.
Taylor warns us not to excuse the truth-functional account of meaning just because it
cannot account for how we identify the truth conditions such that we can evaluate
whether the sentence is meaningful. The truth functional theorist will say: “of course, I
cannot give a full social-psychological account of how our speech practices correspond to
the world; this is to ask too much”. But Taylor’s retorts this reply by the truth functional
theorist, while seemingly more modest, is in fact not ambitious enough (at least not if the
truth functional theorists wants his analysis to be a viable account of meaning).
The kinds of understanding that truth-functional, and hence designativist, theories of
meaning lack are the articulating/constitutive uses of language. The reason is
straightforward: truth-functional analyses of meaning are objectivist in nature, assuming
subject-object bifurcation. Meaning on this account becomes one of formal
correspondence between speaking (actually “language”) or the disengaged observer and
its truth conditions (the world). But to understand the articulating/constitutive use of
language (of speech) is to understand the speaker in context of social practices and
concerns. By social practices here Taylor means all those activities, plans, makings,
institutions, organizations, etc., that often lack explicit articulation. It is always implicit
within our social practices that we have a conception of the subject, freedom, individual
violability, etc. If in our society we are not always conscious of this it is only because we
also have theoretical formulations of the standards governing these practices.
Now in order to understand this social context, we have to (1) understand the context and
the difference its makes and, for that, (2) we have to understand what it is like to be a
participant in this context, and to arrive at such understanding we have to be engaged in
the society/culture.
Thus, to understand the meaning of language is to grasp the social practices and the
fundamental concerns of that community and to do that is to be engaged in the
society/culture in what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons”. This is so for the study of
history as well (where the culture/society is long gone). Historians not only have to know
a long dead language as well as have a firm grasp of his own, but the historian also has to
be able to state the differences without distorting one or the other. Evidently, this could
be a never ending process of understanding and interpreting – as indeed historiographies
cannot differ sharply in their understanding of the past. Clearly all this is incompatible
8
with the detached observer’s standpoint we take in relation to the natural world. For this
Enlightenment derived modern designativist position requires neither understanding nor
does it present a challenge to our self-understanding. The world only requires explanation
and, presumably, the self is never at stake. In contrast, to learn a language one needs to
understand the social life and the concerns of those whose language it is. For the historian
this requires he read all there is in the language of the past or, if there is no written record
to read all there is on the meaning and interpretations of the archeological finding of the
past. What happens here, either in studying the past or in learning a new language, is to
imagine a new “life form” (Wittgenstein), and life forms cannot be understood from a
detached perspective of a monological observer. But to understand ourselves as
monological observers exchanging information leaves out everything that is significant to
language and speaker of the language - for then there is no public space, no significant
concerns, and no disclosure. On such a view, there is clearly is required all other kinds of
theories concerning speakers, societies, cultures, traditions, etc. to fill in the blanks.
Expressivism puts into question the basic premises of contemporary theories of meaning:
namely that meaning can be treated as representation or designation, and that come to
understand language, speak, as monological observers. But, as Taylor asks by way of
conclusion, does this mean that truth conditional theories of meaning are without value?
After all, one of the aims of truth conditional theories of meaning was to explain the
boundless creativity of sentence production (of the form ‘s is true iff p’) on the basis of
finite means (words). But Taylor replies that the whole notion that vocabulary is finite is
itself questionable. For what is most striking about the inventiveness of language is the
coinage of new words, new uses of words, metaphorical leaps of all kind as our existing
words are full of potential extensions. Now the truth conditional theorist replies that the
metaphorical extension of words presupposes some grasp of literal meaning – and what
the truth conditional theories is attempt to do is map out the literal meaning since
presumably these are basic to all metaphorical extensions, rhetorical shifts, irony,
sarcasm, etc., etc. Hence, truth conditional theorists may be said to be committed to the
following: (1) that every expression that can be used to characterize things has a literal
meaning (or in case of polysemy, meanings) along with derived metaphorical extension;
(2) that grasping figurative meanings of these extensions presupposes a literal meaning;
(3) by observing the conditions in which speakers speak along with what we might
ascertain about their motivational states, beliefs, etc., should permit us to isolate this
literal meaning.
These commitments also commit truth functionalist theorists to the “primacy of the
literal”: (1) all speech acts of whatever kind have at least one literal meaning, (2) this
literal meaning is determined by depiction to what these speech acts applies to, (3) literal
meaning is primary, and all other meanings are derived from the literal meaning. In fact,
as Taylor comment, this is a very parochial and culture and ethno-centered view of
meaning/language. It is one that evolved since the Enlightenment such that any other
conception of meaning is deemed pre-logical.
9
In fact, Taylor claims that the literal-figurative so dear to designativists has it all wrong.
Taylor sees the designative conception of literal meaning as a norm established for a
specific purpose within, and indispensable to, a scientific civilization. But instead of
viewing as a norm in this way, we have come to understand all meaning, including
linguistic meaning, as a matter of representation, and so as an explanation/theory of
meaning. But in fact representation is not the only dimension of language; indeed, it is
not even the primary one.
LPM/Feb. 2009